Tag Archives: Freedom Road Socialist Organization

The FBI has known about him since his days as a cage-rattling Chicano activist in 1960s L.A. A onetime fugitive and sometime company man, Carlos Montes has kept on confronting the system the only way he knows how. Now the system is closing in

By Ben Ehrenreich

3/1/2012

The first raid came at five o’clock in the morning last May 17. Carlos Montes awoke to a thud. It was the sound, he soon discovered, of his front door splintering open. The sun had not yet risen, and Montes’s bedroom was dark, but in retrospect, he says, he’s glad he didn’t reach for a flashlight—or for a gun. Montes, a retired Xerox salesman, had kept a loaded shotgun behind the headboard and a 9mm pistol beneath a pile of towels on a chair beside the bed since the day he had walked in on an armed burglar a year and a half before. That time a cool head had kept him alive: He persuaded the thief to drive him to a 7-Eleven, where he withdrew as much cash as he could from the ATM and refused to take another step. This time, fortunately, he was half-asleep: He stumbled toward the hallway empty-handed.

On December 22 of last year, “Fight Back! News, which often reflects the views of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), published an outstanding overview of the DPRK and US imperialism in the Korean Peninsula entitled “Korea Stands Strong: Kim Jong-Il in Context.” The piece did a tremendous job outlining the advances made by Korean socialism and the problems arising from continued Western occupation of the southern half of the Korean nation.

In response to Fight Back!’s thorough analysis, along with two other pieces by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Workers World Party (WWP), David Whitehouse of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) released a hit-piece on Kim Jong-Il and dusted off the typical Cliffite-Trotskyite arguments against actually existing socialism. Published January 12, ‘Socialism in One Dynasty’ rehashes the same anti-communist lines of the ISO that have come to characterize Trotskyism.

On Sept. 17, 2011, a group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City. Their intention: to expose Wall Street greed and corporate domination over the lives of working and middle class people, the 99%. Almost immediately, police responded to the protesters with repression and pepper spray. This caused thousands of New Yorkers to flood to Zuccotti Park. Occupy Wall Street was on. Protesters camped in the park and did not leave for 59 days. Support for the protest built quickly and spread across the country and around the world. Within weeks, almost a thousand cities had Occupy protests. U.S. cities big and small had Occupations, including Chicago, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Tampa and Winston-Salem.

The following statement from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is being reposted here from Fight Back! News:

The United States and its Western allies, along with reactionary pro-U.S. Arab regimes in the Middle East, are doing everything in their power to bring down the government of Syria. They have imposed sanctions that harm the Syrian people. They interfere in Syria’s internal affairs, with the aim of spreading disorder and chaos. Behind these attacks there is the steady drumbeat threatening foreign military intervention.

Like the U.S./NATO war on Libya, the reasons for imperialism’s ongoing assault on Syria’s government have nothing do with human rights. In fact, the U.S. government has shown time and time again that it couldn’t care less about human rights, or for that matter human life. One million plus lives were lost in Iraq. The Pentagon uses drones on the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Thousand have died. American tax dollars sponsor death squads in Colombia and finance the occupation of Palestine. From New York to Los Angles, police have been brought in to repress the Occupy movement. The U.S. government has no right to lecture anyone, anywhere, anytime about human rights.

Now that ten years are passed since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, we would do well to look back and take note of some of the causes and consequences. We need to sum up and draw lessons. Immediately following the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, the Bush administration began cynically manipulating events to launch an expansive and ongoing war on the peoples of the world and an escalating campaign of repression here at home under the guise of a ‘war on terror.’ This two-pronged approach to reasserting the power of the U.S. empire at the expense of working and oppressed people is continuing, and in some ways accelerating under the Obama administration.

As the US/NATO-led rebel forces assault the Libyan capital of Tripoli, it is important for antiwar and progressive forces to recognize a few key points. The development of events since the popular North African revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt led to some divisions among progressive forces as the imperialist countries maneuvered to take control of the situation and develop contradictions in North Africa in their favor. In Libya the U.S., France, the U.K., and Italy joined together to take advantage of the discontent among certain sections of the Libyan people, and thereby develop an armed rebel movement to topple the Gaddafi government. This criminal action taken by US and NATO forces should be condemned by all people of conscience. The success of the NATO-led rebels would certainly mean an end to an independent Libya.

The following is the report from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization to the International Communist Seminar. The topic of the 2011 seminar was “The strengthening of communist parties in times of a deepening capitalist systemic crisis”:

Building A Communist Party in the United States, 2011

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization Faces U.S. State Repression

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is currently facing a campaign of repression by the United States government. On September 24, 2010, under orders from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided homes and activist offices in Chicago, Illinois, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. 14 anti-war and international solidarity activists, including two in Michigan, were subpoenaed to appear at a secretive Grand Jury investigation. Nine more Palestine solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear on January 25, 2011, bringing the total to 23. The 23 refuse to appear at the Grand Jury inquisition where U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald claims to investigate “material support for terrorism”, focused on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In actuality, the FRSO is the target of political repression by the U.S. government. Comrades are facing indictments, a trial, and possibly Federal prison. The main issues are free speech and the right to organize, recently narrowed by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project case. The trial will center around the testimony of a Federal Agent who infiltrated the mass groups and the FRSO.